Beta Testers

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Beta Testers

  By Joseph R. Lallo

  Copyright ©2016 Joseph R. Lallo

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Intro

  It isn’t uncommon for me to introduce a character with a significant and meaningful past that we only learn of in tidbits mentioned in passing. Big Sigma is a series almost completely defined by this. Everyone from Lex to Karter has black marks in their history, arguably the most significant events in their lives, that are referenced but never shown.

  Perhaps the most glaring example of this is the case of a team referred to, in passing, as “The Beta Testers.” This is a mercenary group that Karter considered employees at some point in the years preceding the events of the main stories. They would utilize equipment he had designed, most of it almost completely untested, in order to complete unsanctioned military missions. The only thing we know for certain about this group is that they were stunningly effective, and that a botched final mission left them locked away in military prisons as war criminals.

  Eventually we get to know some of these characters, most notably Garotte and Silo. This story serves as an exploration of how the pair came to work together.

  A scrawny man made a half-hearted attempt to wipe a months-old glaze of spilled drinks from a plastic countertop. He didn’t particularly care about the cleanliness of his establishment, and neither did his clients. Anyone who found their way to this grimy little corner of a grimy little city called Blackhearst on a grimy little planet called Vye-7 was more interested in assorted intoxicants than ambiance. Still, there were only so many ways to pass the time until the first customers of the evening showed up. The flatscreens on the wall were showing the same tired loop of outdated newsfeeds. Their local connection to the global network was spotty, to say nothing of the interplanetary network, so months between updates on relevant events were common. The footage of six-week-old breaking news was silent thanks to the malfunctioning speakers that also ruled out music. He was thus left with reading—hard to justify while at least looking busy—and the two age-old bartender standbys: wiping tables and wiping glasses.

  The door swung open, unleashing a burst of wind from the arid street. This applied a fresh coating of dust to every flat surface in the bar. The tender barely seemed to notice.

  His new customer removed a broad-brimmed hat and beat it on his leg, knocking a layer of dust onto the mat in front of the door. His face and clothes were so caked with windswept soil it was difficult to tell what color they were. A pair of tight goggles protected his eyes, and when he slid them off, it revealed a reverse bandit mask of pale skin beneath the charcoal-gray dust.

  “Hello, fella,” the customer said, his voice boisterous and flavored with a down-home twang. “I hope you got somethin’ cold and wet to wash this crust from my throat. I am downright parched.”

  “Small selection, but what we’ve got, we’ve got lots of,” the bartender said. He hung his rag over his shoulder and made his way behind the bar while the patron tugged a bandanna from a pocket.

  “Bathroom this way?”

  “That’s what the sign says,” the bartender rumbled.

  The customer disappeared into the unisex lavatory, leaving the bartender to ponder what precisely caused the stupidest citizens to cluster at the edges of towns. A few moments later the bar-goer returned with the dust washed from his face and hands and a fair amount of it knocked from his clothes. It didn’t change the look of his clothes much. With so much dark soil in the air, most people were smart enough to wear clothes of a similar color to hide the stains, but his skin looked ridiculously pale after the dust was washed away.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got in the way of beer, buddy,” he said, flopping heavily onto a stool and turning aside to look out the dirty windows along the front wall.

  “In terms of beer, we mostly keep Solar Sail Ale and Drachenbrau.”

  “Give me a tall cold one of Solar Sail. I make it a point not to drink anything named something I can’t understand.”

  The bartender selected one of his well-wiped glasses and stuck it under the tap at a practiced angle. “You new on the planet?”

  “Way I figure it, ain’t no one on this planet that ain’t new. This being on the terraforming fringe and all.”

  “I mean relatively. I haven’t seen you around here, and you haven’t got the—”

  “The tan right? Man alive, seems like all you folks can talk about is ol’ McKenzie’s complexion.” He dug into his pocket and slapped down a well-used squeeze bottle of sunblock. “New regulations. Everyone’s got to layer up if they’re going to do outdoor work. Keeps me from getting toasted but turns to mud as soon as the dust hits it. Leave it to some egghead to get the bright idea to make a layer of glue mandatory in a place where the air’s eighty percent dirt.”

  The bartender set down the beer. “Still doesn’t explain why I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I work over in the Weber District.” He took a sip. “What’s the matter, you skittish about new faces?”

  “We get rough customers in these parts. It pays to know what kind of man I’m dealing with.”

  “I hear that. Seems like this whole planet’s in a tug-of-war between the Broadline Whatchacallit and the—”

  “The Broadline Syndicate and the Piranhas,” the bartender said wearily, as though naming off the diseases responsible for a recent outbreak.

  “Those’re them,” the stranger said, nodding his head. “Seems like a day don’t go by I don’t find myself patching up bullet holes and washing off blood from a scuffle between those two.”

  “Yeah…” The bartender went back to wiping the bar. “I wish they’d just hurry up and wipe one or the other out.”

  “From what I hear, that’s gonna take a while. Rumor has it both sides’ve got guns stockpiled out the wazoo and enough folks out recruiting to keep fingers on triggers for the long haul. It’s a whatchacallit… stalemate.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Seems like what folk need around here is that other bunch to step in.”

  “The Kruger Militia? Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Why not? Seems like they got the law on their side. Colonial rights or whatever. And from the dealings I’ve had, they seem like they’re on the up and up. You could do worse than having them call the shots around here. Matter of fact… I ain’t sure if you could do better.”

  “Maybe so. It’s nice to think of people who hold trials instead of executions running the region, but there’s the little matter of firepower. Around here there’re maybe three hundred Piranhas. You go to the next town over and you’ll get as many Broadline boys. Krugers? You might see a hovervan pass over every few weeks, but they do it in a hurry, because they always collect a few extra blaster holes when they show their heads around here.”

  The customer took a long pull on the beer. “Three-way tie.”

  “More like two-way tie and a team too small to bother beating just yet.”

  “Same difference in the meantime.” He finished the beer and smacked his lips. “You know what needs to happen?”

  “We need to get off this dirtball of a planet,” the bartender muttered.

  “Nah. Vye-7 ain’t so bad a planet. Money to be made here, which means most folks are here to stay. What needs to happen is you need the big boys
to wipe each other out. Chop each other down. Thin each other out. Then the good guys can sweep in and mop up the rest and start straightening things out.”

  “If it hasn’t happened yet, I don’t imagine it ever will.”

  “You never know what’ll happen if the right push meets the right shove.” The customer shrugged and pushed his glass forward. “Fill ’er up.”

  “You gonna pay for the first one?”

  “Oh, well excuse me. Didn’t realize I had one of them dishonest faces that can’t run a tab.” He dug into his pocket and threw down two one-thousand-credit casino chips. “That ought to hold me for a while.”

  The bartender pocketed the chips and topped off the beer. “If you’re working for the city, what’re you paying in casino chips for?”

  “Rather not have booze showing up on the company expense account.”

  “Uh-huh. And if you’re working over in the Weber District, then what brings you out here?”

  “Boss told me to take in the view,” he said, turning to the windows again.

  “… The view?”

  Both men gazed out the windows. This planet had its share of majestic landscapes. Up north where the polar caps were melting down to feed the rest of the planet, you could see glorious glaciers sloughing off into iceberg-strewn rivers. Along the banks of those rivers ribbons of fresh green growth traced curving lines, and in the plains near the largest cities those green bands stretched into idyllic fields of grass, grain, and other crops. That was not what they saw outside his window. The most interesting sight one could hope to see from these windows was the unnaturally jagged crater rim in the distance. Other than that, everything the eye could see was the same rolling desert of ash-like wasteland.

  “Oh, it ain’t much now, but give ’er about an hour and things are liable to get real interesting.” He sipped his fresh beer. “You know what we’re doing over in Weber?”

  “No.”

  “Workin’ on the automation grid. Upper atmosphere navigation and autonomous vehicle routing, if you wanna be specific. Whole thing’s set to go down for maintenance…” He dug a beat-up slidepad out of his pocket. “Right around now, actually. Once that happens, all the upper atmosphere stuff is set to drop down to lower atmosphere and slow up. That’ll push everything else down lower and slower. And that means the unmonitored band for manual traffic is going to pretty much disappear. Just about the only hunk of sky in half a continent that’s not going to be monitored is going to be that slice running over that field.”

  The facts filtered slowly into the mind of the bartender. “Hold on… If everything is going to be monitored, then the kind of business the Piranhas and Broadliners run…”

  “Is fixin’ to pile up right out there.” He grinned. “The boss wants me out here to keep an eye on it. What he thinks I’ll be able to do about whatever it is I end up seeing is his problem, not mine. Far as I’m concerned it’s time-and-a-half to drink beer and watch fireworks.”

  They each looked a bit more intently out the window. The customer plopped his slidepad on the table and tapped out a few commands until it started broadcasting the service channel. An exchange between a gruff male voice and a gruffer female one narrated the work being done.

  “All satellite parameters adjusted?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Traffic lanes shifted?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “How are we looking?”

  “Getting the usual panicked calls from commuters and alerts from long-range terrestrial cargo. No incidents yet.”

  “Keep me posted on any priority or emergency-level issues. You handle anything at the warning level or below.”

  “Yeah, Bill. I know my job. I’ve been working here longer than you.”

  “Darlene, not on the service channel.”

  “Don’t you tell me how to do my—”

  The customer muted the slidepad. “That there is why you don’t fish in the company pond, buddy.”

  Though no longer treated to the play-by-play, the pair scarcely needed it. Distant specks moving in orderly rows, barely visible before, were gradually weaving their way lower. Dotted lines of hovercars moving at less frequent intervals dropped farther still. In the distance, a convoy of heavy-duty cargo vehicles crested over the crater rim. The rather disorderly and chaotic motion of these hovervehicles suggested a human was at the controls of each. A rising dust cloud to the east, no doubt kicked up by a second convoy with a different destination, appeared between two towering dunes.

  “Remember what I said earlier? About pushin’ and shovin’? Well that there’s push, and that there’s shove.”

  He tossed a few more chips onto the bar and slathered on some sunscreen.

  “Keep the change. I’d better get out there. Looks like there’s liable to be some cleanup in my near future.”

  #

  The folksy patron stepped outside and climbed onto a spindly vehicle. It was little more than a roll cage and the bare minimum of hover-apparatus to keep it aloft. In bygone eras it would have been called a “dune buggy.” Locals called it an “ash-runner.”

  Once his hat and goggles were securely in place and he’d pulled a dust rag over his mouth, he zipped through the last few streets of the sparse town. Not far from the edge of town the desert completely claimed the landscape. He took up a position near the top of a dune, then unstrapped a bag from one of the pipes of the ash-runner. Over the course of several minutes he pieced together an impressively complex network of wires, control boxes, and antennas. Rather than doff his precious sun hat, he held the earphone and microphone in place and punched in an exceedingly long encryption key. The makeshift communication center bounced its signal through gateways, firewalls, and other effectively useless security measures and eventually established a connection.

  “Pepper mill,” came a somewhat distorted voice over the heavily secured connection.

  “Oak smoke,” the man replied, accent now replaced with a much more posh one.

  “What is your status, Field Agent?”

  “The navigation network has shifted, on schedule. Right on cue we’ve got Piranha and Broadline convoys set to cross paths. Shall I patch some video through?”

  “Negative. We can’t afford the bandwidth. Describe.”

  The agent raised a high-tech pair of field glasses. “We’ve got a heavily laden cargo convoy coming down the southern slope of crater 312. Unfortunately, the scoundrels haven’t got the decency to label their vehicles, but equipment and troop colors are consistent with the Piranhas. Seven… no, ten armored personnel units. Two tankers, five cargo haulers. Our boys from the Broadline Syndicate are coming in from the east. Similar troop complement, though packed into five larger troop transports. I’m counting nine cargo haulers. Looks like Team 2 did their job. Both convoys are likely transporting a significant percentage of both the merchandise and the armaments.”

  He pulled out his slidepad and brought up a series of menus with the distinctly utilitarian design of military software.

  “Seventy seconds to minimum engagement range. Feeding visual data for target verification and calibrating ordnance.”

  His fingers danced across the menus, selecting ominously named items like “Autotargeting” and “Terrain-Following” and assigning targets. A link to the field glasses fed images to the facial recognition system and one by one populated data about the individuals.

  “We’ve got one hundred percent positive confirmation of Piranha or Broadline membership on all identified individuals. Low probability of collateral damage or civilian casualties. Do I have final confirmation?”

  He glanced back and forth to the slidepad and the approaching convoys. Each convoy had clearly spotted the other. Paramilitary troops in the Broadline vehicles signaled for a change of route. Gang members in the Piranha vehicles anxiously pawed their weapons. The convoys began to diverge.

  “Twenty seconds to minimum engagement range. Targets locked but altering trajectory. Authorize now or
lose the opportunity.”

  “Authorization granted.”

  “About bloody time,” he muttered, tapping the slidepad screen.

  A small turret, more or less equidistant from each convoy, popped up from the sand and launched a rocket-propelled grenade at each of them. The projectiles moved with astonishing speed and precision, each riding mere centimeters from the ground and effortlessly chasing down the lead cargo hauler in both convoys. They each struck with a flash of explosives. A few moments later the pop of the shock wave kicked up dust around the watching agent.

  “I have positive strike on both targets.” He held up the field glasses and cycled through a series of view modes until he found something that could see through the dust. “I have… yes. I have positive engagement between parties. Are you monitoring chatter?”

  “Affirmative. We have calls going out from both sides for backup… Confirmed. Both convoys believe hostilities were initiated by the other.”

  “And so a stalemate becomes a blitz. I’ll remain to—”

  A distant, almost blinding flash silenced him and he braced himself. A thunderous roar rolled over him, rattling his bones from the intensity. When it passed and he was able to turn his attention back to the battle, things had gone sharply downhill. Most of the Piranha convoy was entirely missing. Bits of debris rained down all around, some thumping into the dunes around him.

  “We have a secondary explosion in the Piranha force. Either that or they got hit harder than we expected. I’m seeing nearly total force loss. There are… there are two APCs still operating. They are in full retreat. Broadline Syndicate is pursuing. The Piranha force is as good as wiped out. You told me those convoys were going to be carrying small arms.”

  “Flawed intelligence.”

  “That flawed intelligence may have fouled the entire operation!” he growled and gazed through the field glasses.

  “Report,” the voice on the other end of the connection demanded.

  “Piranhas are down or captured. I see Broadline forces deploying and picking through the wreckage. Probably looking for weapons to salvage. And it looks like they are beginning a security sweep. I have to move or be compromised. Next contact will be at the designated check-in point. I hope to God you’ll have some good news for me then.”